How To Map A New Partition or Volume to A Folder in Windows 7?

Normally, we always assign a new formatted partition to a drive letter, any letter from A to Z that is available on the system. But do you know that you can actually map a partition to a folder instead of a drive letter? The idea is not new at all but have you ever tried if you have already known?

I personally really like this feature and have been using it years ago since I learned it because I don’t like seeing the letters cluttering up in my windows explorer.

Let’s say I want to map a new partition to a folder called temp under my c: drive. Here is how:

1. First of all, make a folder temp, and make sure the folder empty before doing the map.

If you have an unformatted hard drive connected to the computer, the disk management will automatically detect it and prompt you asking for the initialize. You will have to initialize it before doing anything else.

3. Right-click on the disk and pick New Simple Volume…, which starts a wizard that will guide you through the process. Click Next to start.

4. Type in the size you wish to have for the new partition in MB. 400,000 in this case, and Click Next.

5. Here is where we can map the new partition to the existing folder. Instead of leaving it as the default which is Assign the following drive letter, let’s select the second one and browse the Temp folder we have created in the step 1, and click Next.

6. Leave the option as formatting as NTFS, type in the label for the new volume. And click Next.

7. Review all the settings, and click Finish.

Wait for a few seconds for the operation to finish. Once it’s done, I now have a new volume labeled as Test, and sized at 390.63GB

Because we mapped the new volume to a folder, let’s see what it looks like in Windows Explorer.

The property page also shows that the folder is actually a mounted volume.

If you want to know the details about this volume, click Properties button in the Properties window above.

That’s it. Now you have a folder that’s mapped with a new formatted partition. Enjoy.